


Nature, Nurture, Nothing

by fragilelittleteacup



Category: Killer Joe (2011), Natural Born Killers (1994), True Detective
Genre: Crossover Pairings, Drabble, Gun Kink, Gun Violence, M/M, Murder, Violence, complete AU of marty/rust, i may have been slightly off my face when i wrote this, shipping matthew mcconaughey's characters and woody harrelson's characters ftw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 10:35:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9231071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragilelittleteacup/pseuds/fragilelittleteacup
Summary: Joe Cooper and Mickey Knox know the difference between right and wrong. They just don't give a damn.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [教养，空虚](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9285947) by [fragilelittleteacup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragilelittleteacup/pseuds/fragilelittleteacup), [hieroglyphics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hieroglyphics/pseuds/hieroglyphics)



> I wrote this after watching Natural Born Killers, and while delirious with the effects of painkillers (it's been a bad day), so please keep in mind I do not condone violent acts of this kind, and this is purely a fictional exploration.  
> (Also, due to said painkillers, there will probably be grammatical errors...)

When Killer Joe was in the midst of the act, he was like ice. He was distant and removed, because murder was employment, and he was nothing if not a consummate professional. He was a smooth silhouette against a clear night sky; black leather against smooth blue, the shape of his Stetson outlined as if he were a psychopathic bastardisation of the great American cowboy ideal. He was silence, heavy and impenetrable, alien eyes looking out from under hooded lids as he ended yet another human life. He would wait, sometimes, to see if he felt anything. To see whether anything had changed.

Nothing ever did.

But business was business, and slaughter was something else entirely. When he lost control, he was fire. He was burning hot rage, snarls and growls and breathless, insane laughter. His eyes would widen in excitement. His hands would move faster, his breaths hissing in and out of his open mouth like a piston, his face transformed by a gruesome, devilish grin. It was sexual. It was raw. Animalistic.

Fire and ice.

Mickey Knox, by contrast, was always burning with unrestrained fire– but he never reached the level of animalistic rage that Joe did, because he never turned it off. No restraint meant he didn’t need an outlet.

They made quite the picture; Joe Cooper, with his lazy swagger and his leather jacket, unreadable eyes and a perpetual cigarette between his oddly alluring thin lips. When in control of himself, he never smiled, unless he was charming someone– in which case his eyes were dead and utterly empty. Even before his homicidal tendencies had gone country-wide, even when he was still a cop, people had always called him a shark. Always said there was something not right, something that was deeply, deeply wrong with him.

Always standing beside him– as if it they were bound by a force of nature– was Mickey, who was shorter but stockier, built for fistfights and head-on confrontations. He wore Hawaiian shirts and khakis over straps that held an array of weapons to his body. He was always smiling. Always grinning, so fucking friendly. He’d had so, so many friends, before he’d decided they were too tedious to bother with, and thence killed them out of boredom. He was a charmer. He was a guy you would like, if you met him without knowing the truth.

He really, really liked guns.

He had blue eyes, bright as the summer sky, and just as expressive. He hid them behind blood-coloured glasses, the shape John Lennon wore. He kept his head shaved, which resulted in a peculiar brutish attractiveness.

Their faces were plastered across cities, printed in every newspaper, broadcast like heroes on every news station. A nationwide hunt, extending even to the most isolated places, had turned to a sick kind of admiration. They were psychopathic, yes, but you really had to wonder what separated them from everyone else, if an entire country of people could be so fascinated by murder.

It was a craze. An obsession. Housewives dreamed of them. Hippies smoked their joints and talked about the socially revolutionary murderers they’d one day love to shake hands with. Middle-income blue collar workers took inspiration and went on rampages through their workplaces.

America was a very, very easy place for bad people to make their name.

 

***

 

Joe held his gun against the waiter’s forehead.

He was the last one alive in the diner, as per their tradition. Someone had to be left to feed the media. Their fans were begging for it, demanding their next mouthful of death, salivating at the prospect of further loss of life. The bodies that littered the diner, still twitching as they lay dying, were a service to the public. Normal people were insane, and the media was even more so– who the fuck bought and sold death? How had that become a _normal_ thing that _normal_ people did?

Joe didn’t question it. In fact, he was glad of it. Murder was their business, and business was fucking good.

“Mm,” Mickey hummed, as he pressed himself against Joe’s back, bare chest against leather, “baby, you look so good with that gun in your hand.”

“I know.” Joe replied quietly.

“Fuck, just makes me wanna…” Mickey slid his hand down to grip Joe’s crotch in lieu of finishing that sentence. He arched up onto the toes of his bare feet, looking over Joe’s shoulder at the trembling waiter. “Don’t you just think he’s the sexiest motherfucker on the planet?”

“I, uh,” the man stuttered, looking between Mickey’s sparking eyes and Joe’s dead expression, “I-”

“You tryin’ to say he _ain’t?”_

“No,” the man was shaking, sweat creating a sheen of sheer terror over his skin, “no, no, he’s, he’s very nice, he’s very sexy, sir-”

“Yeah, that’s right. He is.” Mickey leaned forward into Joe, slowly thrusting his hips forward, pressing his mouth into Joe’s neck. Joe didn’t react further than allowing his eyes to gently flutter.

“P- Please,” the man was starting to cry, “don’t kill me,”

Mickey gazed adoringly at Joe’s masculine hand, gripping the Beretta 93R so easefully, so perfectly. His fingers were long, and his knuckles were attractively prominent.

“You should fuck me when we leave,” Mickey suggested lovingly, perching his chin on Joe’s shoulder.

Joe stood tall with the gun held out before him, with wide shoulders, a structured face, and gently wavy brown hair. His eyes were clear, unburdened by conscience or regret, and the man before him was nauseated by a terrifying mix of absolute dread and attraction. He had watched the news. He had seen the leaked internet footage of what these men had done, and he had looked on willingly, eagerly. This man, who called himself normal, who called himself decent. He, along with thousands of others, had watched people die, and called it entertainment. He’d gossiped about it with friends. Turned on the television, just to watch the news.

Now he was here, exposed to it in real time. And reality did not equate to what he had imagined.

“Please,” he whimpered, “please, don’t.”

Joe watched him. There was nothing in Joe, not even the smallest piece of humanity to plead with or beg for mercy. Mickey killed people because he had been abused as a child, and all his insanity stemmed from what had been done to him; Joe killed because had been born this way. He’d been a baby that did not cry, that did not scream in newborn need for his mother. He had been empty, the moment he’d left the womb.

And he held this man’s life in his hands.

Mickey slid his hands up Joe’s abdomen, searching fingers reaching below his shirt, nails scraping against skin.

“You’ve gotta leave him alive,” he breathed, words hot against Joe’s neck, “we need him.”

“Do we?” Joe asked quietly, just to see the man before him convulse with fear.

“Come on.” Mickey’s fingers dug into Joe’s stomach, a hint of frustration threading itself through his voice, “Come on, I want you inside me. Fuck this guy, you should pay attention to _me.”_

Joe smiled, a small expression that was meant only for Mickey.

“Alright,” he said.

He lowered the gun and turned around, draping his long arms over Mickey’s shoulders.

Just like that, he released the man’s life. He did not consider the intensity of such an act, whether it equated to mercy or cruelty that they had slaughtered everyone left only the waiter alive. He did not care. He did not think. He pressed his lips against Mickey’s, nothing hidden below his skin except a void of emotion.

They were Knox and Cooper, famed celebrities of the early nineties.

And the world was their fucking oyster.

 

 

 


End file.
